This site hopefully can provide some vehicle by which I can comment, complain, and once in a while praise the state of religion in this country and around the world from a liberal protestant perspective.

Saturday, March 19, 2005

From a friend of mine:This being the third year of the war in Iraq, it is becoming easier and easier to forget that the toll of death for our own troops has now passed 1,500, or to ignore the nervous breakdowns the surviving troops are having. The increase in the suicide rate, the pain of those who survived but are missing parts of their bodies and perhaps of their souls.

Easy to overlook that over 100,000 civilians in Iraq have been killed. Easy to grow accustomed to the charges of torture and murder at the hands of US interrogating officials in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq. Easy to forget that the cost of the war is now running to about 300 billion dollars - at a time when we face cut backs to health care, human services, and aid to the poor.

The key is not ever to get "used" to these events, where they become the normal backdrop of our lives. Rather they need to remain causes of outrage as when they first happened...otherwise an easy normalcy takes over which makes it's peace with this state of affairs. One response is to support legislation which would ban the U.S. practice of shipping prisoners to countries that we have reason to believe engage in torture.

Here's a piece on a minister who has spent a lifetime of resistance, William Sloane Coffin, chaplain at Yale during the Vietnam War. He was an organizer in many of the campaigns for peace and justice during the last 40 plus years. He has recently turned 80 despite his numerous health problems. His new book, Letters to a Doubter which comes out this summer will undoubtedly speak important truths to the world we live in today.